Gov. Nathan Deal has finally signed the bill that dominated most of the discussion and media coverage in this year’s legislative session: HB 170, the transportation funding bill.

In adopting the bill, the governor, the legislative leadership, and rank-and-file Republicans went against one of their party’s bedrock principles: Taxes are bad and should never be raised. This was a huge tax increase that the General Assembly passed.  It will initially generate more than $900 million a year for projects, but it is indexed to rise with the inflation rate and increases in gasoline mileage standards. This means tax collections will soon cross into billion-dollar territory.

The boosters of HB 170 may have slightly underestimated what the bill will do for transportation infrastructure. They say that $1 billion a year gives the state a bare minimum of what is needed to maintain existing roads, but some experts acknowledged the growing pot of money could pay for new construction as well. “We may be able to do other projects outside of maintenance,” Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry conceded.  

It was not a perfect bill—far from it—and the critics of HB 170 made valid arguments against the measure. Exhausted legislators were ordered to vote on a complex bill without having enough time to read or analyze it. Critics of the bill derided it as a taxpayers’ gravy train for highway contractors, and there is no question that construction firms are going to reap a bonanza from all the paving projects DOT will start rolling out. Very little money was set aside for transit.

But there is also the fact that Georgia has long ranked near the bottom in public spending on transportation infrastructure, which left the state weighed down by crumbling highways and structurally unsound bridges. Deal made a strong point here: “It would be a great tragedy if we had an accident with a school bus on a deteriorating bridge.” He was right—you only have to think back to the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, which killed 13 people and injured 145, to understand what the consequences could have been for Georgia.  

In all the commentary about the adoption of HB 170, something that wasn’t noted much is this:  The bill marks a real turning point in the ongoing debate about how much people should pay for the services they expect from their government. For the past decade or more, the fundamental argument of GOP legislators has been that taxes should never be raised and government spending must always be cut. Dozens of lawmakers signed a pledge that they would never vote for a tax hike. The argument was extended even further by libertarians who contended that government isn’t even necessary, because private enterprise and the free market will always come up with the right solution to every problem.

In the real world, of course, the free market won’t magically find a way to fix everything. There will be times when governments have to do it, which means raising taxes to pay for addressing these problems. There are even times when businesses will have to be told they can’t have a tax break. That’s how politics works. The adoption of HB 170 was a sign that those realities are hitting home with many of those who serve at the Gold Dome.